Overall the leaf litter in the salty plots began disappearing 41 perecent faster than before, according to the study, which appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new study reveals that salt can not only speed up decomposition, it can encourage population explosions in species higher up the food chain.

"What is new about it—and is actually pretty cool—is we had very little idea of how [salt] propagates in the ecosystem," said Carlos Martínez del Rio, a physiological ecologist at the Univeristy of Wyoming who was not involved in the research. "It's like a salt cascade."